80% Clicks On Facebook Ads Were Originated Through Bots: Limited Run

It seems that Facebook has got a long way to cover in the best interest of its advertisers and marketers. Unlike Google, Facebook is missing the robust ad management system to earn the confidence and loyalty among its revenue drivers.

An ecommerce company has recently accused Facebook of being incapable in terms of managing and delivering the legitimate clicks for its ads. “Limited Run” posted on its blog that the company has found 80% clicks on its Facebook Ads originated through bots. “Limited Run” which is running its Facebook page in the name of “Limited Pressing” has also decided to ditch Facebook and has urged its fans to follow the company over Twitter for any further engagement.

Limited Run has also accused Facebook for committing $2000 worth of advertisement per month as the Limited Run wanted to change the name of its page from Limited Pressing to Limited Run.

Responding over the Limited Run’s allegation, Facebook has opted precautionary and subjective route and said “We’re currently investigating their claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.”

Probably, the issue could only be limited to Limited Press or it could be an unnoticed affair which is continuously denting many of other advertisers. On contrary, Facebook doesn’t charge from its page owners of they wish to do so but the request goes through human processing in roder to avoid any confusion. Whatever it could be, one thing is pretty clear; the allegation has raised the debate (and doubts) over Facebook’s efforts to stand strong as a best and prominent alternative of Google Adwords.

Facebook is fighting hard to strengthen its advertising revenue stream in order to keep their investors’ confidence intact. The latest financial performance of Facebook has disclosed that nearly half of network users are on mobile devices, making company to accelerate its efforts for seamless integration of mobile ad network to monetize its mobile traffic.

The recent allegation has created as setback for its efforts to lure advertisers and marketers as such activities will have larger negative impact with advertisers and marketers with their clients and business.

Limited Run – a 2009 founded e-commerce portal pertaining to stores for artists, labels, designers or anyone selling unique products directly to fans – has closed its Facebook page with disappointing note thanking its supporters and urging its fans to follow on Twitter, where they don’t get shaken down.

Here goes the complete announcement by Limited Run

Hey everyone, we’re going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20 percent of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2 percent of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80 percent of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That’s correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let’s move on, because who the bots belong to isn’t provable.

While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we’re not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That’s correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of shit out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They’re scumbags and we just don’t have the patience for scumbags.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this page and liked our posts. We really appreciate it. If you’d like to follow us on Twitter, where we don’t get shaken down, you can do so here: http://twitter.com/limitedrun